In a sweeping escalation of the attack on public education, the Trump administration has embedded a nationwide private school voucher scheme in its new federal budget proposal. If passed, it will establish a universal voucher program for the first time in US history, bankrolled by an unprecedented $5 billion annual tax credit giveaway to wealthy donors.

School vouchers are schemes by which public tax dollars designed for public schools are repackaged into “scholarships” and reallocated to families for private school. They originated in the US in the 1950s as “tuition grants” to circumvent racial integration mandated following the landmark Civil Rights ruling Brown v. Board of Education.

The ramifications of Trump’s measure are no less reactionary. Public resources would be transferred from chronically underfunded schools serving the working class and poor into private, religious-based and elite institutions.

The initiative follows decades of billionaire-funded campaigns to open up the “education market.” Political Action Committees, such as the Koch brothers’ School Freedom Fund and the American Federation for Children, supported by the family of Betsy DeVos, invested hundreds of millions of dollars into backing failed ballot initiatives to enact statewide vouchers or to target the election campaigns of legislators in opposition.

The big lie is that these are grassroots parental campaigns for “choice”; they are not. Polls consistently show that voters reject vouchers when given the chance. In fact, since 1970, voters have never approved a statewide ballot measure to create or expand private school vouchers, according to the National Coalition for Public Education.